March 2015 – Page 2 – HollowLands

March 7, 2015

Building the world of The Chained Adept – Part 1: Maps

Posted in Fantasy, Science Fiction, Setting, and The Chained Adept

Writers of fantasy and science fiction books have special needs. Not only do we have characters to create from scratch, like every novelist, but we have entire worlds to build — not just the verisimilitude of the historical past, but entire planets, spacecraft, or fantastic realms. Our desks are littered with bad sketches of landscapes, terrible character portraits, and far too many scraps of idiosyncratic cosmogenesis.

You know who else has these problems? Dungeon masters.

Old school dungeon design software — “Old school” dungeon design software

The world of Dungeons & Dragons and subsequent games created a need for game masters, those referees who control the world of their game for their players, to make maps, create character cards, and so forth. Not surprisingly, there's an ecosystem of software to support this.

A couple of months ago, I invested in most of the software modules from ProFantasy and started playing around. I needed to design a complete secondary world for a new series, The Chained Adept, and it wasn't going to be modeled on Earth at the geology level (although I planned to keep the flora & fauna so that the readers wouldn't need to master an entire ecosystem of vocabulary).

I started by designing a planet, using Fractal Terrains 3. By providing a handful of parameters and tinkering with the results, you can create an infinite number of alien planets.

The World of the Chained Adept — The world of The Chained Adept

March 2, 2015

Karen Myers

There’s a Sword for That

Posted in Adaptability, Artwork, Buntel Mayit, Monsters, Monsters, And More, Science Fiction, Short Story, The Visitor, The Visitor, And More, and There's a Sword for That

In addition to the novels I'm currently working on, I'm making a practice of producing more short stories and submitting them to various magazine and anthology markets. Rather than just search for random topics, I've decided to write as many of them as possible for ultimate inclusion in a single collection, called There's a Sword for That.

As you can see from the progress meters on the right, there are four stories so far. This is a science fiction collection, not fantasy, somewhat unexpectedly for stories with swords in them. So far, they've included children, sessile tentacular creatures, intelligent multi-purpose devices, and a famous historical kris (not all at once, of course).

There's a frame to this collection — the Curious Arms weapon shop, tucked away on a space station. All the covers will show the weapon shop and one of the weapons (the cover for the collection will include a rosette of all the weapons).

As each story completes the submission process and becomes available again, it will be published by Perkunas Press, and eventually the entire collection will be available as a book, too. That's more than a year away for some of the stories, but at least a few should be available this year. Since I like to get the covers done sooner rather than later, you can at least get a preview of what they'll look like.

March 1, 2015

Karen Myers

Leaving out the boring bits

Posted in Just for Writers

It's wintertime, there's a helluva lot of snow on the ground, and my 4WD car is in the shop. So, when it comes time for groceries and the liquor store, we have no alternative but to take our big old Ford F150 pickup truck, with its snow plow attached, down off the mountain and go lurching into town.

It looks a lot like the picture, but decades older, with a much (much!) longer bed.

My husband has a hard time getting around, so I usually go with him to run in and out of the stores. He does the parking.

It's hard to turn off the writerly brain a lot of the time, and I'm usually yanked from a writing session to “go run errands”, so I'm typically still writing in my head as we hit the road.

There we were, trying to find parking along the streets of this small, narrow town (since there's no getting that vehicle into most Main Street parking lots). He began backing into a slot on the street, and I was impatient to hop out and let him finish that while I started the errand in the store. But, no, he didn't pause to let me do that — he concentrated on the mechanics of the parking and left me fuming in frustration until he stopped and I could get started.

And then it hit me. I wanted him to leave out the boring bits of the scene and go straight to the action. What a pity we can't do that in real life.

Month: March 2015

Building the world of The Chained Adept – Part 1: Maps

There’s a Sword for That

Leaving out the boring bits